Some bluegrass musicians specialize in what’s called the high lonesome sound.
Drive into Victor sometime and you’ll see high lonesome.
At 10,000 feet, surrounded by long, green, mountain vistas and hundred-year-old industrial structures and tailings piles scraped from the mountainside, Victor tells you better than anyplace in the state that booms go bust.
From the minute you drive into Goldfield, with its motley collection of houses, including an ancient train car rotting in place, you know you’ve found someplace that used to be someplace, but isn’t any more. The headframe to the Portland mine looms above Goldfield, just north of Victor on the east side of Battle Mountain. Old mine works dot the hillsides of what once was called “the world’s greatest gold camp.”
You can spend a pleasant weekend in Victor hiking, snowshoeing, cross-country skiing or mountain biking the network of trails and old roads that go up to many old mine sites.
Don’t go by way of Cripple Creek, though. Take the turnoff from Colorado 67, which winds up the Rainbow Valley from Divide along the west flank of Pikes Peak. Bear left onto Teller County Road 81, slow for the cattle guards and before you know it, you are somewhere very different.
Casinos have made Cripple Creek a gold-mining theme park shadow of its former self, in the same way that Breckenridge is a skiing theme park mining town and Aspen is a Fendi- bag-toting theme park mining town. You can’t deny that all these places have a historical link to mining, but that’s about all they have.
I will come right out and say that I don’t care much for gambling. Every time my husband buys a Lotto ticket, I bite my tongue to keep from reminding him that the lottery is a tax on those who can’t do math.
I’ve been to Black Hawk once, spent one weekend in Las Vegas a long time ago, and passed through Reno a couple of times. Don’t like the flashing lights and ringing bells, the Spandex and push-up undies, the pretense of exclusivity that panders to our worst instincts even as it sucks money out of our pockets, the free drinks you pay for many times over.
On my first trip to Reno, my date and I stopped to watch the action at a card table behind a velvet rope. A man in a business suit was playing blackjack for $5,000 a hand. He busted twice in about two minutes. I watched him drop half a year’s salary (for me, obviously, not for him), step around the rope and walk away. The sour expression on his face never changed.
(And lots of people love to play $5-a-hand cards and the slots and all that, and they come in from other places to have a great time and subsidize an industry that keeps people employed. I still liked Cripple Creek better when its main attractions were the melodrama and the Mollie Kathleen mine. End of rant.)
A harsh life
Victor was a cow pasture before the first gold strike in 1890. In its heyday, at the turn of the century, the mining district boasted a population of 45,000. Some 500 mines pulled gold out of an extinct volcano. Four railroad lines and two electric streetcar companies moved material and people back and forth.
This time of year, with the sun heading south, the old mine works look simultaneously sad and sinister. You get a better feel in Victor than in our other mining towns for the harshness of a miner’s life, even today. (The Cripple Creek and Victor Gold Mining Co. operates a surface mine just north of town.) Then as now, some got amazingly rich; the rest worked hard in a place that is beautiful but unforgiving.
The stories of the gold rush days are wonderful. In the process of digging the foundation for a new hotel, workers found a 20-inch vein. Oops! Sudden change of plans. The Gold Coin Mine was set up right in the middle of town. In 1938, three chums from the School of Mines risked their necks removing a pillar from the spent Glorietta Mine. The gold in it was worth $2.04, enough for two beers at Zeke’s Bar and 8 cents change.
When you walk the streets of Victor, the sense of place is strong. Grand buildings like the Masonic Temple stand next to workmanlike ones like the newspaper office where famed broadcaster Lowell Thomas got his first job. They put on brave faces until you walk up and peer in the windows at piles of junk, collapsed ceiling plaster, dust and decay.
And then you can walk into Sally’s and get one of the best thin-crust pizzas in Colorado, or spend a comfortable night at the spectacularly renovated Victor Hotel, far from the buzzing and banging of the casinos. The Victor Trading Co. makes brooms, tinwork and candles the old-fashioned way, by hand. There’s a feeling of community that makes a person want to get a broom and some paint and start working.
If you go to any Colorado gambling town, you’ll see the same money-money-money hype that attracted people here a hundred years ago. The Woods Brothers, promoters of the Victor area, said you could “mine gold with a plow.” Of course that was nonsense, but it brought people to the area by the wagonload.
When the mines played out, all that remained were the empty houses and the sales literature and some brave people to figure out how to pick up the pieces. There’s a lesson there someplace; I leave it to you to figure out what it is.
Lisa Everitt is a freelance writer who lives in Arvada. Contact her at lisaeveritt@comcast.net.
The details
The Victor Hotel, in a beautifully renovated former bank building, offers 20 comfortable rooms with private baths, cable TV and free wireless Internet. It’s a pet-friendly hotel, so you can bring your dog up the old-fashioned cage elevator. Rates start at $69.95 through October. It’s at the corner of Fourth Street and Victor Avenue; 719-689-3553 or 800-713-4595, victorhotelcolorado.com.
